All China’s projects and objectives (including military) on AI
China is investing billions of dollars a year in AI development, raising security concerns for the United States. Here because. The article by Marco Orioles
The "factory of the world" that is China competes today with the USA also in cutting-edge sectors such as artificial intelligence (AI), an area in which Beijing, also thanks to a constant and massive flow of public investments, has developed very advanced in both civilian and military fields.
This is the theme of the opening essay of the new issue of Limes magazine directed by Lucio Caracciolo, in which two analysts. He Tian and You Ji, review the reasons why, in their view, it is not entirely excluded that the Dragon can overtake the superpower no. 1
Chinese strategic plans in AI
He and You open their essay by recalling that Beijing pursues its ambitions in the AI sector on the basis of two programs drawn up by the State Council: the Made in China 2025, dating back to 2015, and the Thirteenth Five-Year Development Plan of strategic emerging industries, released in 2016.
Both programs highlight the role of AI in "several key areas, from robotics to information technology, from electric cars to aerospace equipment".
The two great goals of AI according to China
There are two macro objectives that the Chinese plans entrust to AI: to accelerate the transformation of the country into a "moderately prosperous society", and to have advanced techniques of social control. Against the background of these macro-objectives, the challenge with the United States also emerges as to who will have primacy in this delicate area that crosses crucial issues such as defense and national security.
The key to Chinese efforts is, as the authors write, “the development of the smart economy , of which artificial intelligence is the driving force, supported by other new generation technologies such as 5G, cloud computing, big data, internet of things , edge computing, blockchains , hybrid reality and quantum computing”.
The flourishing of Ai's private companies
Beijing is investing billions of dollars a year in the development of these sectors by funding private companies that conduct experimental and applied research.
Thanks to political support, Chinese companies have greatly advanced the state of the art of AI in the country. In this regard, the authors recall that "in 2020 the number of strategic companies in the context of AI exceeded 3 thousand with an increase of 19%" compared to the previous year.
The great march of AI in China has ensured that companies in the country today have a competitive advantage in the field of algorithms and application software: the cases of Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent are cited here, which have made massive investments in the construction of the ten largest national centers of computing and data processing.
Notable progress has also been made in the semiconductor area. In this regard, He and You write that the "intelligent chip companies such as HiSidicon (Huawei), Cambricon, Smic and Ziguang Zhanrui have promoted the integration of AI in intelligent terminals and security devices as well as in urban projects ( smart cities )”.
The implications for national security
The ambitious objectives pursued by the Dragon would not be such if there were no repercussions in the field of national security, Beijing aims at a large-scale use of AI as a tool for the modernization of the defense sector in the context of a profound conceptual transformation of war which is increasingly being understood "as a large-scale, hybrid conflict against the likes of the United States, rather than a limited confrontation with a regional threat".
The People's Liberation Army has identified several areas of use of AI for military purposes, both in terms of combat means and in terms of devices dedicated to data collection, processing and analysis operations aimed at supporting the decision-making process. A privileged area of application of AI is then that of cyber warfare.
A sophisticated ecosystem of drones
But if there is a context in which Beijing has decided to stake everything on AI, it is the development of a sophisticated ecosystem of drones. China, the authors point out, has "devoted enormous resources to the development of unmanned aerial vehicles since the late 1990s and today boasts a complete range of military drones, as well as the largest production capacity in the world in this sector".
In this sense, the case of the Caihong series is cited, which today includes the Ch-1, Ch-3, Ch-5 and Ch-7 models, with the latter which, although conceived for reconnaissance and monitoring tasks, can also pilot other weapons and carry large missiles to hit moving targets.
The concerns of the Pentagon and the US strategy
It is in light of these developments that the Pentagon estimates that Chinese AI has reached a level of approximate parity with that of the United States. Hence, Washington, fearing overtaking, has decided to stop the Chinese race by leveraging the need for each Ai system to have a large number of advanced chips .
"Washington has therefore launched", the authors report, "a large number of administrative measures to stifle Chinese progress in the development of microprocessors, also imposing restrictive measures on its allies and on companies that export chips and produce components in the People's Republic".
This is the scenario of the so-called "chip war" in which the US proceeds on the double track of asserting its superiority in the field of semiconductors and preventing Beijing from developing comparable capabilities.
The outcome of this war is not obvious and we will see it in a short space of time.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/cina-ai-progetti-obiettivi/ on Sun, 29 Jan 2023 06:50:36 +0000.